Attempts to set out intuitions or intimations of the Divine nature and attributes from the stories and poems of the world's religions. The author delves into the poetry and sayings of Sufi, Buddhist, and Hindu mystics, the nature religion of the ancient Mesopotamians, their kin the Israelites, and the Aboriginal people of Australia.
Val Webb attempts to set out intuitions or intimations of the Divine nature and attributes from the stories and poems of the world's religions.
"Like Catching Water in a Net, the winner of the 2007 USA Best Books award for "Religion: general," carries forward the concerns animating those earlier books. There is ample recognition here of the necessary service doubt can render. Feminist insights are richly mined...But as the book's argument builds, one finds oneself hungering for the "Yes" in our undeniably human efforts to describe the divine. Webb is not going to settle for a wholly apophatic theology, reaching rather for a positive alternative to the problematic pieties she so emphatically critiques (66). She celebrates the fact that "a new Christianity is evolving, uncovering the human Jesus so long buried under centuries of dogma" (206). There seems to be, after all, a deep anthropological basis for this religious quest (211, 227)...She presses herself to go further, to identify "mega-characteristics" (111) in a reformed way. Thus she will speak of "the Divine, the world and ourselves as 'good' in aesthetic rather than moral terms" (115), calling upon Thomas Aquinas, Alfred North Whitehead, Dag Hammarskjold and the Turkish poet Fazil for explication. Or she will have us employ "the Image of GOD as Communication (NOT Communicator, because that returns to an 'idol' like us that we create)" (76). More materially, she will speak of "Love as a unifying, reconciling Force within this universe" (120)." - Paul R. Sponheim, Word & World 28/3, Summer 2008
